Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

A comment by SouthBend states that naphtha can not cause a Boiling Liquid Expansion Vapor Explosion, but steam can. This is exactly backwards. Steam does not explode. It can cause a rupture of a boiler, but it will not explode. Naphtha, and more usually, light natural gas liquids such as propane are prone to BLEVEs. A BLEVE is caused when a fire impinges on a pressure storage vessel, suchas a railcar, and weakens the wall of the vessel. The liquid inside is hot because of the fire, and when the vessel fails, the liquid hydrocarbon boils out and escapes as an expanding vapor cloud, and that cloud will explode when it finds an ignition source, e.g., the fire that caused the rupture in the first place. BLEVEs are extremely powerful, and scary as hell.

"I can tell you that these folks will soon have about a thousand red ants as guests for that lunch"

The red fire ants common to Florida and the SE USA started showing up in the 1930s and spread rapidly thereafter. In the 19th century they weren't present. There were native fire ants but their behavior is much different, they don't sting, and weren't much of a problem.

William Henry Jackson took several views of this picnic party. The LOC has other images from the same event scattered in their negative records but brought together by the keyword "Tomoka." Other images in this set reveal that the launch in the picnic photo was named the Nemo.

In the luncheon party there is one more guy than girl.
Maybe she's the shutterbug.

[William Henry Jackson was the photographer here. One the enormous view cameras used to expose these 8x10 inch negatives can be seen folded up on top of the boat next to a carrying case for the glass plates. - Dave]

There's some gear over near the picnic. It looks like standard size stuff(8"x10"perhaps) for the time. But the really big camera is, I think, folded on top of the boat canopy, near the prow. 20" x 24" I'd guess. Not much enlarging in those days, so big picture=big camera. Is that the case for it back by the stern?

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.